New York Times best-selling author and primatologist Frans de Waal explores the fascinating world of animal and human emotions. Frans de Waal has spent four decades at the forefront of animal research. Following up on the best-selling Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which investigated animal intelligence, Mama’s Last Hug delivers a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals. Mama’s Last Hug begins with the death of Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. When Mama was dying, van Hooff took the unusual step of visiting her in her night cage for a last hug. Their goodbyes were filmed and went viral. Millions of people were deeply moved by the way Mama embraced the professor, welcoming him with a big smile while reassuring him by patting his neck, in a gesture often considered typically human but that is in fact common to all primates. This story and others like it form the core of de Waal’s argument, showing that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. De Waal discusses facial expressions, the emotions behind human politics, the illusion of free will, animal sentience, and, of course, Mama’s life and death. The message is one of continuity between us and other species, such as the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we don’t have a single organ that other animals don’t have, and the same is true for our emotions. Mama’s Last Hug opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected, transforming how we view the living world around us.

A seminal exploration of animal emotion, sentience, and cognition, revised and expanded to incorporate a surge of new science When award-winning scientist Marc Bekoff penned the first edition of this book in 2007, he predicted that over time our understanding of animal cognition and emotion would grow “richer, more accurate, and possibly different.” Since then, not only has the field seen an explosion of new and startling research, but the popular interest in the subject has grown as well, spawning countless podcasts, articles, and bestselling books. Bekoff skillfully blends extraordinary stories of animal joy, empathy, grief, embarrassment, anger, and love with the latest scientific research confirming the existence of emotions that common sense and experience have long implied. Filled with light humor and compassion, The Emotional Lives of Animals is a clarion call for reassessing both how we view and how we treat animals.

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to emotion, with contributions from biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, robot engineers, and artists. A wide range of emotional phenomena is discussed, including the notion that humans’ sophisticated sensibility, as evidenced by our aesthetic appreciation of the arts, is based at least in part on a basic emotional sensibility that is found in young children and perhaps even some non-human animal species. As a result, this book comprises a unique comparative perspective on the study of emotion. A number of chapters consider emotions in a variety of animal groups, including fish, birds, and mammals. Other chapters expand the scope of the book to humans and robots. Specific topics covered in these chapters run the gamut from lower-level emotional activity, such as emotional expression, to higher-level emotional activity, such as altruism, love, and aesthetics. Taken as a whole, the book presents manifold perspectives on emotion and provides a solid foundation for future multidisciplinary research on the nature of emotions.

Some investigators have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. However, with advances in neurobiology and neuroscience, researchers are demonstrating that this position is wrong as they move closer to a lasting understanding of the biology and psychology of emotion. In Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp provides the most up-to-date information about the brain-operating systems that organize the fundamental emotional tendencies of all mammals. Presenting complex material in a readable manner, the book offers a comprehensive summary of the fundamental neural sources of human and animal feelings, as well as a conceptual framework for studying emotional systems of the brain. Panksepp approaches emotions from the perspective of basic emotion theory but does not fail to address the complex issues raised by constructionist approaches. These issues include relations to human consciousness and the psychiatric implications of this knowledge. The book includes chapters on sleep and arousal, pleasure and fear systems, the sources of rage and anger, and the neural control of sexuality, as well as the more subtle emotions related to maternal care, social loss, and playfulness. Representing a synthetic integration of vast amounts of neurobehavioral knowledge, including relevant neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry, this book will be one of the most important contributions to understanding the biology of emotions since Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising examination into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals.

Hailed conservationist Carl Safina examines animal personhood as told through the inspired narrative portraits of elephants, wolves, and dolphins